France has an estimated one million Protestants in a population of 58 million. The Protestant community has given France the Prime Minister, Mr Lionel Jospin, a former Socialist Prime Minister, Mr Michel Rocard, and the Nobel Prize-winning writer, Andre Gide, and, although he was an atheist, the writer Jean-Paul Sartre was born to a Protestant family.
The St Bartholomew's Day massacre, carried out in a struggle for control of the French court in 1572, has since remained one of the darkest episodes in the country's history. Many French Protestants were angry that Pope John Paul's four-day visit to Paris coincided with the anniversary of the massacre, and demanded a gesture of remembrance.
The massacre still haunts mainly Catholic France, and the massacre and the obscure political plots leading up to it has provided the graphic script for a recent film, La Reine Margot (Queen Margot), starring Isabelle Adjani.
The massacre took place against a background of rivalry between France and Spain for the control of Flanders, and a 10-year-old war between Catholics and the persecuted French Protestants, or Huguenots.
On August 20th, 1572, Catherine de Medici, the pro-Spanish mother of Charles IX, France's Catholic monarch, engineered an attempt on the life of his powerful Protestant aide, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, who was advocating war against Spain.
A badly wounded Coligny warned the king about his mother. King Henry of Navarre, a Protestant, had just married King Charles's sister Margot, and came in line for succession to the French throne.
When Henry demanded that Coligny's attackers be punished, Catherine de Medici then ordered a massacre of Protestants and the murder of Coligny. Catherine's powerful allies, including the Duke of Guise, stormed Coligny's home, slit his throat and dumped his body.
Church bells pealed, calling Catholic militia to arms. The killings went out of control on the eve of St Bartholomew's Day as Catholic militia, with knives and swords, fanned out through Paris, dragging Protestants from their homes and slitting throats in an orgy of terror. When the morning of August 24th, 1572, dawned, thousands of bodies lay in streams of blood on the streets. Even to this day, controversy surrounds the death toll, which has been variously put at between 1,000 and 10,000 in Paris, and 2,000 up to 100,000 for the whole country.
But the wars of religion were not over: 22 years later, Henry of Navarre, after besieging the French capital, declared in a famous quip: "Paris is well worth a Mass". He converted to Catholicism and was crowned King of France.
In 1598, King Henry promulgated the Edict of Nantes, granting Huguenots civil rights and toleration. He was assassinated 12 years later in an antiProtestant plot.
King Louis XIV, attempting to forcibly convert Protestants, revoked the Edict of Nantes almost a century later. Many Huguenots went into hiding in remote mountain villages in southern France, and about 400,000 went into exile, taking their industrial skills to Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland.
The persecution of Protestants ended in France in 1764, and the Revolution in 1789 made them fully fledged citizens, with citizenship guaranteed to the descendants of Huguenots who returned from exile.